Somewhat unsettling, really not good at all, and some advice I wished someone had told me a whole bunch of years ago...
The other day I got one of those emails from a reader taking issue with something I've said a time or two of small boats making sense. His main point seemed to be that while smaller boats might be less expensive...
"What about the safety factor?"
Seriously, I'd much rather be in a well found 30-footer sailing short-handed in bad weather than in a 40-footer sailing short-handed. The reason I mention being short-handed as part of the mix is because most cruisers cruising sail short-handed as the norm rather than the exception.
A bigger boat is a lot more work and when things get nasty it's even more work. Sailing a bigger boat in bad conditions is more tiring and if anything goes wrong, fixing it, as a rule is going to be more work and complication making a bad situation worse.
Bigger boats are not stronger... Sure, their fittings might be beefier and the hull might be a bit thicker but you have to keep in mind that the forces involved in a bigger boat are much greater requiring the heavier stays, hull thickness, etc but that does not really equal a "stronger" boat as the added strength is more about the stresses of being bigger than it is about actual strength. For those curious, a great way to test this is to run a 36-foot Beneteau into a rock at hull speed then repeat the same exercise with a 50-foot Beneteau and compare the carnage. For those who don't live in a place where there are lots of bareboats doing just this sort of thing on a regular basis I'll let you know that the smaller boats pretty much always come out of it with substannsially less damage.
Most importantly bigger boats are by their very nature more complicated and bigger which can be problematic in itself. I've lost track of the number of boats I've known or read about who could not source a major catastrophic leak when needed and the bigger and more complicated the boat the harder it gets.
Which is not saying that all small sailboats make sense either... As for everything where boats are concerned it's always going to be complicated and with no small amount of compromise to arrive at the best boat for what you're actually going to do. The best advice I can come up with is to ignore all of the easy black-and-white truisms like bigger = stronger, stronger = safer, or more expensive = safer and suchlike because they don't really work in the real world.
Listening to Jim White & the Packway Handle Band
So it goes...
